


No Alarms and No Surprises, Please

by Anonymous



Series: RNM Week 2019 [1]
Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: M/M, Malex, Post season finale, rnm week 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-22
Updated: 2019-07-22
Packaged: 2020-07-10 20:50:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19912006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: “You know all my secrets,” Alex says. “Sometimes I think I’ll never know everything about you.”





	No Alarms and No Surprises, Please

**Author's Note:**

> written for Roswell Week.  
> some allusions to Michael's childhood.

“You know all my secrets,” Alex sighs, watching Michael dismantle the Humvee’s gear hubs. “Sometimes I think I’ll never know everything about you.”

“You know _me_ ,” Michael points out. He loosens the rear suspension and tugs it free from the chassis.

“Yeah, but you don’t tell me things unless you have to.”

“Neither do you.” Michael’s t-shirt is hanging from the back pocket of his jeans; he takes it out and uses it to wipe his forehead. Alex ogles him, he can’t help it. Michael is so at ease in his body, carelessly graceful like some great jungle cat. Alex never inhabited his own body casually, even before he lost part of his leg. He watches with a touch of envy as Michael stands upright and cracks his back, the muscles in his shoulders and abdomen rippling as he does so. “Me, I’m an open book,” Michael says. “All you gotta do is ask.”

“Really?” Alex wonders if they’re turning some new leaf in their relationship. Learning to communicate— _verbally_ as well as physically—has done them a world of good, made them _friends_ , but when they stumble onto difficult subjects, it still feels more like performing a root canal.

“Yeah, whatever you wanna know.” Michael strolls over to him. “Every damn embarrassing thing.” The weight of the various ratchets and wrenches he’s tucked into his belt are pulling his jeans low on his hipbones. Alex looks; Michael doesn’t mind when he does.

When Michael drove him home last night, they had the radio on and it was playing a Rihanna song that had been popular while they were in high school, and without touching the dial or raising his voice to be heard over the thumping bassline Michael said, “You know I love you.” He didn’t say anything else. Alex whispered that he loved him too and Michael nodded and continued driving like nothing at all had happened, which in a way it hadn’t.

Alex hands him a glass of lemonade; that had been his initial reason for coming out here. But the presence of the Humvee, which Alex had finally given Michael permission to dismantle and reassemble however he wanted, inevitably brought up the past. His father, his brothers, the Air Force. Alex heard himself talking, almost against his will. Several times Michael reached out to him, but each time abandoned the gesture, just listening quietly till Alex ran out of steam. _You know all my secrets._ Michael tosses back the lemonade in a single gulp and returns the glass to Alex. “Thanks,” he says.

“How about you tell me a secret,” Alex says. “Maybe I’ll feel less naked if you do.”

“I’m already more naked.” Michael hooks his thumbs in his pockets, and Alex isn’t sure if the nonchalance is real or feigned. “But fine. Ask me something. I can’t just, like, generate a secret off the type of my head.” Michael doesn’t like artificial conversations; neither of them do. But swapping childhood traumas is the kind of forced equivalency Michael especially loathes.

Alex goes for it anyway. “Which did you hate more, the Albuquerque meth-heads, the Santa Fe drunk, or the Roswell fundamentalists?”

Michael looks at him imploringly. Alex is about to retract the question with an apology when Michael curses to himself and scuffs the toe of his boot through the dirt. “Santa Fe drunk,” he mumbles.

“Can I ask why?”

“You get used to being hit,” Michael says, and Alex nods. He knows. Michael knows he knows, so he doesn’t elaborate. “Even the exorcisms the religious freaks tried to perform on me—like, it was beyond fucked up, but they weren’t _wrong._ About my TK. It just wasn’t satanic in origin.” Michael laughs; at what, Alex isn’t sure. “But the guy in Santa Fe…”

There’s a long pause while Michael stares out over the tree line.

“He had a son, a few years older than me. Kid was probably what we’d call a sociopath. He kept telling me I should kill myself.”

Mechanically Alex sits up straighter, grabbing the rail as if he’s about to stand. He runs his tongue around the inside of his mouth. “What did he say that for?”

“I dunno.” Michael shrugs. “He said no one would miss me if I was dead because I didn’t have any family or any friends.”

“He talked that way to you? In front of his dad?”

“The drunk? Yeah, he’d just tell the kid not to encourage me, because if I topped myself they’d lose the check and get CPS sniffing around.” Michael shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “I had learned how to take a shit-kicking, but the psychological stuff was a lot more demoralizing.”

“Yeah,” Alex agrees faintly.

“But I _did_ have a family,” Michael points out. “I knew it was my job to protect them, Max and Isobel, so eventually I ran away and when the system caught up with me at least I was back in Roswell.” He cracks his knuckles, and Alex knows this part of the conversation is closed. “Valenti thinks I need therapy,” Michael says. “He keeps offering me a referral, says some HIPAA-potamus clause will keep me safe even if I let slip something… _alien._ ” Michael rolls his eyes and Alex, who’s found himself postponing counseling session after mandatory counseling session at the VA clinic over the past year, hasn’t really got a leg to stand on here. Metaphorically speaking.

So he changes the subject. “Speaking of Kyle,” he says. “I heard him apologizing to you again last night. How many more times is he gonna have to say ‘sorry’ before you forgive him?”

“Eh, maybe a dozen.” Michael shrugs. “It’s kind of funny.”

“You don’t think you’re being a little unfair?”

“Nope.”

“Kyle, Liz, Rosa, they—”

“—feel sorry for me ’cause my mom burned to death and then Max died?”

“Our friends genuinely _like_ you, you know that, right?” Alex says.

“Even though I never make any effort with them?” Michael’s eyes narrow.

“Maybe you should.”

“Why, you think I’m being ungrateful?” His chest is damp with sweat and Alex would be tempted to _lick_ those shimmering beads of perspiration off his skin if he weren’t beginning to get annoyed.

“No, I just mean the way you’re always holding yourself apart, even when we’re with people we trust—it must be kind of lonely,” Alex says. He hates the way Michael’s face freezes at his words, the way his eyes go blank like he’s tucking his feelings away somewhere Alex can’t see them.

“I’m used to it,” Michael tells him, without inflection. “I’ve been lonely my whole life, really.”

Alex’s annoyance evaporates. “Michael,” he starts—

“Sometimes I think people don’t understand how lonely it is to be a kid,” Michael says. “Or they get older and they forget. I never grew out of it, I guess, that feeling of being alone, of not mattering. Tough habit to break.”

Alex knows, and at the same time he doesn’t know. The terrible solitude of Michael’s upbringing will always be unknowable to him, on an elemental level, and he feels a stab of something like grief at the thought.

“Open book, remember?” Michael smiles ruefully. He pulls a ratchet extender out of his pocket and fiddles with it, apparently for no other purpose than something to do with his hands. “Anything else you wanna know, Alex?”

“When we were together—when we were young… Were you lonely then?” he asks, his voice smaller than he’d like.

“No,” Michael says. “For the first time ever, I wasn’t.”

“And what about those weeks last year?” Alex presses. “When we were, sort of, back together?”

Michael looks at him searchingly, like he doesn’t understand where Alex is going with this. “No? I mean, I was frustrated sometimes. When you wouldn’t stay the night, when you kept calling me a criminal. But I wouldn’t say I was lonely, exactly.”

“And when you were with Maria?”

Alex regrets the question as soon as it’s out of his mouth. Michael’s expression turns steely; he hates it when Alex corners him into a position where he might be compelled to speak ill of Maria. 

“I don’t know,” he says flatly. “I didn’t feel totally like myself with her. For any number of reasons.”

Alex nods, settles back on the step. Michael comes to sit beside him then, and Alex can feel the heat pouring off his skin, even though Michael has left a couple inches between them. “Michael,” he says. “You know when we were driving back last night?”

“Yeah.”

For a moment Alex wants to keep sitting here with him under the blazing afternoon sun, prolonging the intense silence and enjoying the sensory quality of just _being_ with Michael after all the ugly things they’ve shared.

But time moves on.

“What about it?” Michael says.

“I wanted to ask you to move in with me.”

Michael doesn’t say anything.

“But then I… sort of lost my nerve,” he admits. “I didn’t even ask you to sleep over, and I wanted you to stay, especially after what you said and what I said back.”

“When I said ‘I love you’ and you said ‘I love you too,’” Michael clarifies, not quite smirking. “What are you, Manes, _ten_? Wait till I tell you where babies come from.”

“Ugh.” Alex looks away, rubbing his temples.

Some time passes.

“It would be pretty fast of us,” Michael comments at last, like he doesn’t really have an opinion one way or the other. “For a new relationship and all.” 

Alex breathes, feels the slow inflation of his diaphragm. “It might be fast if we’d never been together before,” he acknowledges. When Michael doesn’t respond, a creeping fear sets in. He exhales, pressing a hand down hard against his abdomen, forcing the breath out of his body, then inhales. Exhales. “I _really_ wanted you to stay last night,” he says. “I wish I’d asked you.”

“Oh.” Michael exhales too, and his bare shoulder brushes against Alex’s sleeve. “I would’ve stayed. I wanted to. But I thought you wanted space after we said we loved each other. Guess we both misunderstood.”

“Yeah.”

Michael clears his throat. “I don’t know what’s the best thing for us,” he says. “Obviously I’m really happy you asked me. But at the same time, we’ve fucked up so repeatedly in the past.” He brushes Alex’s arm with his shoulder again, and Alex thinks it’s deliberate this time. “I really don’t know how I’d survive it, Alex, if we went off the rails again. I—I’ve hit what I thought was my breaking point so many times that I…”

“Sure.” Alex’s eyes are wet now. He has to rub them to stop the tears running.

“Can I think about it?” Michael asks. “I gotta make certain Izzy feels looked after, too.”

“Of course.”

“I don’t want you to think…”

“I don’t.” Alex shakes his head furiously, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. He wishes he’d thought to bring out a pair of sunglasses. Then Michael wouldn’t have to know he’s crying.

“I hope you don’t feel like I’m rejecting you,” Michael says. “’Cause I’m not. I love you.”

Alex nods, head bobbling stupidly on his neck.

Michael drags a hand through his hair, scratches his jaw. “I might head back to mine now, if that’s cool. I just. I need to think.”

But he doesn’t get up. So Alex rises instead, using the railing to haul himself to his feet. “Okay,” he says. “Bye.”

Michael reaches for his hand and Alex gives it to him without thinking. For a moment Michael holds it, his thumb moving over his knuckles. Then he lifts Alex’s hand to his mouth and kisses it. Alex feels utterly crushed by the weight of Michael’s power over him, the vast ecstatic depth of his _need_ for this person. “Oh,” he says, and Michael squeezes his fingers. Alex feels a low gratifying ache inside his body.

“I’m just nervous.” Michael sounds hoarse when he speaks. “I feel like—it’s probably obvious that I don’t actually wanna go, huh?”

In a tiny voice, Alex replies: “I don’t always find it obvious what you want, Michael.”

Michael gets up and stands before him. Alex remains stock-still, every nerve bristling. He wants to whimper out loud, which is totally unbefitting. Michael puts his hands on his hips and sways towards him and Alex lets Michael kiss his open mouth. The sensation is so extreme he feels dizzy, even though the kiss only lasts a second.

“I want this so much,” Michael says. His grip tightens on Alex’s waist. “I don’t wanna leave and I don’t wanna spend another night apart from you. I never feel lonely when I’m with you.”

“So you’ll move in with me?” Alex confirms, Michael’s forehead a reassuring weight against his own.

“Yeah, fuck it,” Michael says, which is such a perfectly Michael thing to say that Alex snorts in spite of himself. “I mean,” says Michael, “What’s the worst that could happen, right?”

**Author's Note:**

> previously: THE LIGHT-YEARS, SATELLITE'S GONE, etc. 
> 
> <3


End file.
